This blog comments on a variety of technology news, trends, and products and how they connect. I'm in Red Hat's cloud product strategy group in my day job although I cover a broader set of topics here. This is a personal blog; the opinions are mine alone.

Friday, March 17, 2017

How to Succeed in Business by Bundling – and Unbundling - Much of the business story of the digital age so far has been about taking products and institutions apart — unbundling them. Music CDs were unbundled into MP3s that were sold (and illicitly downloaded) individually. Newspapers have been unbundled by blogs and classified ad sites.

Friday, March 10, 2017

We’re in the middle of big changes in how we bundle up software and deliver it. But packaging didn’t start with software. I take you on a tour of how we’ve packaged up goods for consumption over time and--more importantly--why we did so
and what different approaches we’ve taken then and now. The goal of this talk is to take the packaging discussion up a level so to better focus on the fundamental objectives and some of the broad approaches and trade-offs associated with achieving them.

Tuesday, March 07, 2017

I recorded a number of podcasts at the Open Source Leadership Summit in Lake Tahoe last month. Most of them are with heads of the various foundations under the Linux Foundation. They’re each about 15 minutes long. In addition to the podcasts themselves linked to from the blog posts, five of them have transcripts and two have stories on opensource.com.

"Telecom operators are looking to rethink, reimagine, and transform their networks from things being built on proprietary boxes to dynamic cloud applications with a lot more being in software. [This lets them] provision services more quickly, allocate bandwidth more dynamically, and scale out and scale in more effectively."

"The shift that we made was to create a support system and an education system to take a user and turn them into a contributor, first at a very low level and educate them to bring them into the committer pool and eventually into the maintainer pool. The end result of this is that we have a wide range of skillsets. Rather than trying to attract phenomenal developers, we're creating new phenomenal developers."

"That's what gets me excited is these positive social impacts that at the same time, are also potentially helping solve structural problems for the business sector. I haven't seen that kind of synergy, that kind of combination of value from these two different things since the early days of the Internet."

"When you have those developers that feel like their contributions are valued and taken seriously, then there's a whole ecosystem that forms around them, of companies that are interested in offering services to them, employing them, that want to make these services available to other folks. Then a foundation like ours can come up and help make those services available. I really think that, that developer focus is the key thing to keep in mind."

"Going forwards, we're trying to move to probably put more into the strategic stuff, because we feel like we can get better leverage, more magnification of the effect, if we put money into a tool and the capabilities to use that tool. I think one of the things we're looking at for 2017 is work to improve the usability of a lot of security tools.There's no shortage of great tools for doing static analysis or fuzz testing, but there is often a difficulty in making it easy for you to integrate those into a continuous test process for an open‑source project. Trying to build things to make it easier to deploy the existing open‑source tools is an area in the strategic spin that we want to put a lot into in 2017."

"People have learned their lessons, and I think they want to standardize on the thing that will allow the market to grow. Everyone wants containers to be super‑successful, run everywhere, build out the business, and then compete on the actual higher levels, sell services and products around that, and not try to fragment the market in a way where people won't adopt containers, because they're scared that it's not ready, it's a technology that's still [laughs] being developed."

“With container technology and the ability to produce a true cloud‑native application that's running on some kind of a framework which happens to be available on‑prem or in cloud, you suddenly have the ability to move that application on‑prem or off‑prem, or both ‑‑ run in both places at the same time if so you choose ‑‑ and be able to do that in a way that's been unprecedented in our industry."

Connections

In addition to the above podcasts with foundation directors and analysts, I also sat down with Josh Bernstein, VP of Technology, and Clint Kitson, Technical Director for {code} by Dell EMC to talk about open source and communities.

About Me

I'm technology evangelist for Red Hat, the leading provider of commercial open source software. I'm a frequent speaker at customer and industry events. I also write extensively on and develop strategy for Red Hat’s hybrid cloud portfolio.

Prior to Red Hat, as an IT industry analyst, I wrote hundreds of research notes, was frequently quoted in publications such as The New York Times on a wide range of IT topics, and advised clients on product and marketing strategies. Among other hobbies, I do a lot of photography and enjoy the outdoors.